Already, in the _Vita Nuova_,[139] she appears to
him as afterwards in the Terrestrial Paradise, clad in that color of
flame which belongs to the seraphim who contemplate God in himself,
simply, and not in his relation to the Son or the Holy Spirit.[140] When
misfortune came upon him, when his schemes of worldly activity failed,
and science was helpless to console, as it had never been able wholly to
satisfy, she already rose before him as the lost ideal of his youth,
reproaching him with his desertion of purely spiritual aims. It is,
perhaps, in allusion to this that he fixes the date of her death with
such minute precision on the 9th June, 1390, most probably his own
twenty-fifth birthday, on which he passed the boundary of
adolescence.[141]
That there should seem to be a discrepancy between the Lady of the _Vita
Nuova_ and her of the _Convito_, Dante himself was already aware when
writing the former and commenting it. Explaining the sonnet beginning
_Gentil pensier_, he says, "In this sonnet I make two parts of myself
according as my thoughts were divided in two. The one part I call
_heart_, that is, the appetite, the other _soul_, that is, reason.... It
is true that in the preceding sonnet I take side with the heart against
the eyes [which were weeping for the lost Beatrice], and that appears
contrary to what I say in the present one; and therefore I say that in
that sonnet also I mean by my _heart_ the appetite, because my desire to
remember me of my most gentle Lady was still greater than to behold this
one, albeit I had already some appetite for her, but slight as should
seem: whence it appears that the one saying is not contrary to the
other.
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